by Lou Anders
“Kye Owen, would you like to tell me what you’re doing?”
Owen turned, and the robot horse body turned with him, becoming more a part of him with every second. Melvin Agerholm, the only currently living Kye emeritus of the school, was standing in the smaller open doorway leading back into the tower’s greater depths.
“Good morning, Kye Agerholm,” Owen said. “I’m just on my way out.”
“To do what?”
“Isn’t that obvious?” Owen gestured to the large flat-screen TV mounted on one wall. It showed live news coverage of the battle in Liberty. At the moment the camera was following a wild-eyed young man, dressed all in red, madly cutting down one person after another with what may have been a knife. It was hard to be certain, as his weapon hand moved too swiftly to follow. Then another man in a cape landed next to the knife-wielder, was clearly about to strike him, but suddenly looked pained, weak, and confused. The knife hand moved in a blur. There was a spray of crimson and then the caped man fell headless to the ground.
“I’m going to Liberty, to help,” Owen said.
“No you don’t,” Melvin said. There were liver spots visible on the pleated folds of his neck. “You aren’t in the superhero business anymore. Those days ended when Gravesmith took your legs. You’re a teacher now. Your job is to create new heroes to take up the mantle.”
“But with this battle wagon—” Owen began.
“Which isn’t yours. It’s school property, created at great expense to help you train your students. Period. School’s not in session now, so you’ve no business fiddling with it. Park it back in its stall, Owen, and stand down. I see a number of your former students are already in Liberty, doing what you’ve so ably educated them to do. Let that be enough.”
Owen moved a few steps toward one of the shuttles parked in the hanger—the heavy one, big enough to carry him and his borrowed robot half to Liberty in a matter of minutes.
“Leave now and I’ll convene an emergency meeting of the board,” Melvin said. “You’ll be dismissed within the hour.”
The two men, equally stubborn and willful, stared at each other as the black tower drifted silently through untroubled skies.
L is for Liberty
Man of the Hour
Only five short years ago, Liberty, Pennsylvania, was the safest of all major American cities in which to live, work, and raise a family, because Sergeant Liberty, its beloved hometown champion and protector, kept it so.
Then Sergeant Liberty fought the (now infamous) duel with his arch nemesis King Ogre, and everything changed suddenly and, it seems, irrevocably.
Everyone knows the details. It was a long and terrible battle, ending only when Sergeant Liberty finally threw his foe down from the top of the Codex Tower’s revolving restaurant. King Ogre went to the morgue. Liberty went to the hospital.
In the emergency room, dedicated doctors worked tirelessly to save him. Of course, they had to cut away his mask. The wounds to his face and head were too severe. And of course, the entire incident was recorded by the treatment room’s cameras. It was strict hospital policy to record all medical procedures for educational and insurance purposes. But it wasn’t policy for one of the hospital’s many employees (the specific offender was never discovered) to isolate a few key frames of that recording and sell the pictures to the Liberty Post.
Before he was out of the critical care ward, while he was still in a medically induced coma, the Post had identified Sergeant Liberty as none other than one Joseph Armstrong Wilcox, a contractor specializing in decorative stonework for new home construction. Afterward they never adequately explained, nor unconditionally apologized for, their decision to publish. One reporter described it as “more of a case of no one deciding not to publish.” Within a day of the news hitting the streets (Saturday morning bulldog edition) Joe’s wife and three children had been slaughtered in their Cedar Valley neighborhood home. The killers were never found. It was widely known that Sergeant Liberty had many enemies, most of whom were certainly the sort to carry a grudge and have the will to act on it in so brutal a fashion.
When he’d recovered, of course, Joe Wilcox left Liberty, never to return. Nor was Sergeant Liberty ever seen again.
M is for Max
Master of the Blade
There was a pause in the battle for a moment and The Ordinary Man couldn’t help himself. He was standing next to Max the Knife and he had to ask. “You know the song is ‘ Mack the Knife,’ right? Not Max.”
“Yeah, so? My name happens to be Max.”
“Okay, but some part of you has to realize it’s dumb to use one of your real names as part of your trade name. And it’s even dumber, because that isn’t actually the name in the song.”
“You’d best let it drop,” Strangeface interrupted. “Max doesn’t like to be corrected.”
N is for Nightfall
The Avenging Shade
Describe it? Okay, it was a mess, a complete clusterfuck, and getting worse every minute. Achilles and Doc Jerusalem were doing well enough, I suppose, but overwhelmed by all those killer robots. No wonder Strangeface had been so inactive for so long. The whole time he must have been building a new robot army, only this time it numbered in the thousands—maybe even the tens of thousands. How could he do it? Who was bankrolling him? And why weren’t we watching him more closely? I have to admit, we really dropped the ball there.
Some of the new kids were doing well too. Xenoboy was tearing hell through the steel mob, like an atomic-powered buzz saw, leaving shrapnel in his wake. Captain Yesterday showed up and blasted away with her ray gun. And that new girl, Wonder Child, was incredible. She was evacuating and rescuing bystanders right and left, sometimes snatching them right out of the bad guys’ clutches. You could barely see her, she was so fast.
And speaking of fast, where the hell was Fast Johnny? I heard a report over the system that he was on his way, but he certainly wasn’t there by the time I’d arrived. I don’t think he ever showed up. That can’t be good news.
Anyway, we were doing pretty good against the robot troops, but no one was getting past them into the ranks of the actual villains, who were all huddled together, making sure they stayed close to one guy in the middle. I decided to head that way and see why—you know, spread some darkness, amp up the spooky, and see if I could scare some of them away. I certainly wasn’t doing any good against the damned robots. They weren’t human and couldn’t be frightened. It was a big stalemate. They couldn’t harm me, since all their bullets and laser beams passed right through me, but I couldn’t do fuck all to them either.
So I went after the leaders.
Boy was that a mistake.
No sooner did I get within spitting distance than I started to feel weird—decidedly unghostly. And that’s when I knew I’d screwed the pooch something awful. Suddenly I was grounded, solid, alive, and very normal again. Do you know what happened? The guy with them was The Ordinary Man! I didn’t recognize him until it was too late. Before I could say “oops,” some kid with a normal handgun shot me right between the eyes.
Dead before my body hit the ground.
So, that brings us to this. What do you say, you Spirits of Vengeance? Do I get another one of your phantom resurrections? Who makes that decision? You? The entire Steering Committee? Or is this something the full voting body has to weigh in on? Am I still your ghost with the most?
O is for Ordinary
The Power Taker
No one could safely approach the members of the New Cryptera as long as The Ordinary Man was among them. If they stepped inside the area covered by his “bubble of normalcy,” their extraordinary powers vanished, even while he still allowed his new partners in crime to keep theirs. He’d learned how to be quite selective with his gift. When Visionary shot at them from miles away with his array of deadly glances, those effects stopped short at the barrier. Only ordinary phenomena were allowed in his vicinity, unless he was the one to grant an exception.
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��We’re doing great!” Professor Hell said. “No one can harm any of us!”
“But I’m still losing robots at a terrible rate,” Strangeface said. “And none of the heroes are suiciding like they’re supposed to.” The broadcasts instructing the heroes to kill themselves continued without letup.
“You’ll be compensated for the losses,” Professor Hell said. “And the capes will do what they must, once they fully realize their cause is hopeless. Continue killing the innocent and they’ll have to relent. Or we’ll eventually succeed in killing them ourselves. Either way we win.”
Thunderhead wandered here and there, outside of The Ordinary Man’s zone of safety. He’d never been one to cower behind someone else’s skirts. Emil watched him blast Xenoboy with a bolt of lightning from the dark tangle of roiling cloud that permanently obscured his head—or maybe existed in place of his head—no one seemed to know for certain. Xenoboy wasn’t down for long, though. He shrugged off the attack and returned to the fight. Emil uttered the word that would make Xenoboy’s flesh melt off his body, but nothing happened. Damn, he thought. What’s his weakness?
Suddenly Underman was among them, striking out right and left. Max went down, followed by Gunslinger, who fell in such a way that Emil knew at once that he was dead. His neck was clearly broken. His head lay at an odd angle to the rest of his body.
“He’s still got his powers!” Emil called out to The Ordinary Man. “Do something!”
“I can’t!” The Ordinary Man said. “I’m not sure what’s wrong!”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Underman said. “I just don’t happen to have any superpowers for you to cancel. This strength is perfectly normal for where I come from. Ordinary, I guess you’d say.”
Underman struck again, and The Ordinary Man went out like a light.
P is for Pretender
The Consummate Faker
Lawrence Nash, The Great Pretender, pointed his finger at a woman trying to crawl away on a broken leg. “Pow,” he said, and the woman died from a gunshot wound.
“Pow,” he said again, and a man thirty feet away fell.
He brought his other hand up to join the first and swept a small cluster of people huddling under a half-collapsed bus stop shelter. “Rat-a-tat-tat-tat,” he said, and three of them fell to machine-gun fire. He swept his pretend tommy gun back the other way, and the remaining two died alongside them.
“Trench broom!” he said. “The Chicago typewriter!”
Lawrence was having the time of his life. If Professor Hell wanted him to kill harmless civilians, then he was tickled to do it. Privately he thought their big plan was idiotic, but that didn’t worry him. When the time came, and the tide of battle turned, as it inevitably would, Lawrence would simply imagine himself at the controls of a sleek personal rocket ship—just like Captain Yesterday’s—and make his escape.
Enough simple gunplay, though. Time for something bigger, grander, and more imaginative.
Lawrence saw a news truck down the street and pretended he had a portable missile launcher on his shoulders—one of those things they kill tanks with. “Woosh!” he said and the news truck exploded up into the air. Bodies flew out of it. About half of them were still alive when they came down. One of the survivors was blonde and pretty.
“Hey, do you know who that is?” Lawrence looked around for someone to tell, but everyone near him was dead. Damn. What’s the use of spotting the world’s most famous news personality if no one was there to witness it? He walked over to get her autograph.
Q is for Questing Beast
The Magician’s Last Scheme
Emil was scared again. While The Ordinary Man was awake and active, he’d felt terrific, untouchable, and had begun to think of himself as the dreaded Professor Hell again. But now he was once more acutely aware of all of the dangerous superheroes in the immediate vicinity and his many vulnerabilities.
Don’t lose your nerve, Doctor. We can still win this.
It was Bad Moon’s voice in his head again.
“Where have you been? You were supposed to be guiding me!”
I couldn’t reach you as long as you huddled within The Ordinary Man’s sphere of influence. He didn’t know I was involved and so didn’t allow for my mental communications to flow into you. A simple oversight on our part, corrected now.
“Corrected only because The Ordinary Man is out of action! Maybe dead! We’re in serious trouble without him!”
Not at all. You’ve enough power to win the day all on your own, provided you keep your wits about you. First, send the others out, looking for targets. No need to stay together now. Command them to die, if necessary, as long as they take an opponent with them.
“And if we all die in the doing of it, then who’s left to rule this world we’ve sacrificed ourselves to conquer?”
Me.
“You? Alone!”
Surely a man as intelligent as you had to realize that was the heart of my plan all along, Doctor. All that matters is that I survive to step in, once the carnage of this day has run its course. Now go and sow destruction among your enemies. Use those amazing powers. Impress me.
Emil tried to convince himself that the fugitive prince of the Battle Moons was right. He was smart and powerful. He could indeed triumph today, even without The Ordinary Man. First he would take a cue from Hark and find a way for others to do the fighting for him from now on. He brought out a handful of Hark’s moondust from his pocket and threw it toward Thunderhead, the closest team member to him.
“Kill them all!” he shouted. “All of the heroes! Nothing else matters!”
Then he reached deep inside of his own mind and gathered up all of the magic spells waiting there—every dark and deadly possibility—and bound them into a single container, to which he added claws, fangs, a feral, predatory nature, and unquenchable hunger, and threw in a few poisoned barbs, just for good measure. He spoke a word of conjuration and the creature stood before him, ready to do his bidding. He thought of it as his personal questing beast and placed the images of his many opponents into the thing’s mind.
“Go get ’em,” Emil said.
And it did.
R is for Razorheart
The Bionic Marine
Malcolm Westmore lost both of his hands in Afghanistan, fighting for his country. His country was grateful and replaced his hands with advanced bionic versions that included a retractable set of indestructible razor-sharp blades that he could deploy from the tips of his metal fingers. These blades cost more than the price of an aircraft carrier and could cut through any known substance.
Malcolm had sliced at least fifty robots to ribbons today and was looking for something more interesting to cut when he spied an old villain called Professor Hell stumbling toward him through the smoke and ash and general fog of war.
“You’ll do,” Malcolm said.
Emil saw Malcolm, the superhero who called himself Razorheart, at about the same time and yawped in surprise and fear. He’d spent all of his magic constructing the questing beast and had nothing left to save himself. But he did still have half a pocketful of Hark’s moondust. He threw every bit of it into Malcolm’s face. Then he looked around for something to order the frightening hero to do. He could barely make out Saint George a block down to the right.
“Kill Saint George,” Emil ordered. “Open him like a can of sardines and then gut whoever you find inside.” Emil didn’t pause to see if Razorheart would obey, but just hurried on his way, quickly disappearing into the ash cloud that engulfed the entire riverside area.
Malcolm stood silent and still for a time, wondering at the strange sense of disorientation and numbness that had come over him. Then he slowly began to remember how much he hated Saint George. He hated Saint George with all of his heart and mind and oft-troubled soul. He began to walk down the street. Then he began to run.
Saint George saw Eleanor Eastman, the great but impossible love of his life, lying in the street. She was injured and bleeding. He quickly
finished tearing apart the killer robot he was holding and flew to her side. He didn’t see The Great Pretender approaching her from one direction, nor Razorheart approaching from another. All of his attention was on Eleanor. He picked her up, oh so gently, in powered arms that could lift a battle tank and throw it half the length of a football field.
“I’ve got you,” he said.
That’s when Razorheart sank all ten of his deadly blades deep into Saint George’s unprotected back. No less than twelve different independent defense systems in the Rocket Knight’s armor recognized Razorheart as a friend and ally, and so did nothing to stop him, not realizing the possible threat until it was much too late. The armor plating on the Gold and Green Knight’s back pealed away like tissue paper, as did several of the major power lines running underneath it. Both major power plants suffered catastrophic failure. Saint George froze into place, Eleanor still in his arms.
“Going to kill you now,” Malcolm Westmore said. But he didn’t get the chance.
The Great Pretender was understandably upset. He’d nearly reached the pretty reporter to get her autograph—and maybe her phone number—when that armored oaf Saint George came swooping in ahead of him.